The Daughters of Erietown

by Connie Schultz

  “He’d like a grilled cheese,” the woman said. She looked at Sam, but didn’t smile. “And a glass of milk. I’ll have the chicken in mushroom sauce.” She smiled at the boy. “Please. And a Coke.”

  Sam scratched down their orders. “Coming right up. Paul. Would you like me to bring over our box of crayons? You could draw on the back of your place mat.”

  He looked at the woman, who nodded her approval. “Yes, please.”

  Sam dropped off the order at the grill and grabbed a box of crayons from the hostess stand. “Here you go,” she said, ceremoniously depositing the box in front of him. “You look to me like you might be an artist.”

  He smiled. “I kind of am, don’t you think, Aunt Lizzie?”

  The woman leaned against the back of her chair and crossed her arms. “Well, now that I think about it, you just might be. Your mommy was an artist, you know. She used to doodle pictures of butterflies all the time. On the backs of napkins.”

  “Do you like to draw?” Paull asked Sam.

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “Funny, too. I doodle butterflies, like your mommy does.”

  “Did,” the woman said. “She used to. He lost his mother six years ago.”

  Sam squatted so that her face was level with his. “I’m so sorry, Paul. I didn’t know that. I’m sorry you lost your mommy.”

  He reached for the box and pulled out a crayon. “That’s okay. I’m used to it. I don’t really remember her.” Sam glanced at the woman. She was staring at Sam.

  “Would you draw a butterfly before you go?”

  Sam looked around the room and saw Jeanine waving her over to a table of six. “Sure, but I have to be quick, so you’ll have to be my assistant.” She used the black crayon to sketch a butterfly hovering over a daisy. “Yellow, please,” she said. He reached in and pulled out the crayon. “Thank you,” she said, coloring in the petals. “Orange and green, please.” He pulled out the two crayons.

  She quickly filled in the wings. “Okay, one more color.” She tapped her temple. “Hmm. Blue, please.”

  “I already have that one in my hand!” She smiled at him. “How ’bout that?” She wrote in block letters above the butterfly, ARTWORK BY SAM, and stood up. “Now,” she said, patting his head, “I expect to see your butterfly before I leave. And you have to sign it, too, okay?”

  The rest of the night was a blur. Sam delivered meals to the woman and Paull, but quickly dashed off to wait on four other tables. She returned to refill their water and check if they wanted dessert, but Jeanine ended up delivering their bill and cashing them out.

  After she had finished her side jobs that night, Sam was heading out the back door when Jeanine called to her. “Sam,” she said, reaching under the hostess stand. “I was told to give this to you.” She handed her a place mat. “That lady with the little boy said she thought you’d like this.”

  Sam smiled at the purple butterfly drawn in a child’s hand next to hers. “Aw,” she said, reaching for it.

  She froze. Butrflys by Sam and Paull.

  “Sam? What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” she said, folding the place mat into a small square. “Nothing’s wrong.” She tucked it into her apron pocket and walked out the front door.

  Ellie groaned as she lowered herself to her knees in front of her hope chest at the foot of her bed. She shifted her weight, trying to find the sweet spot that allowed her to pretend that working forty hours a week on her feet wasn’t taking its toll. She rummaged under the stack of her grandmother’s unused linens until she felt the hard edges of the book. She pulled it out and stared for a moment at the gray-and-white cover.

  “Love, Marriage and the Family,” she read aloud. “By Kenneth Walker.” The book had been a wedding gift from Mrs. Archer, one of Aunt Nessa’s neighbors. “Thank God that boy married you,” Mrs. Archer said to Ellie, patting her stomach after arriving unannounced. Aunt Nessa slammed down the pot of freshly brewed coffee and escorted the visitor out the door.

  Ellie turned to the page she had bookmarked, and read the circled passage:

  In the first place, it can be said that desire in men is more generally uniform than it is in women. Another way of putting this would be to say that women are the extremists and men are the moderates with regard both to sex and to the emotions. The truth is reflected in such old sayings as: “the best angels in heaven and the worst devils in hell are all feminine.” Whilst marked variations are found in the intensity of the sexual drive amongst men, the differences are much less marked amongst men than amongst women. In other words, many more cases of excessive passion or nymphomania and of complete indifference to sexuality, or frigidity, are to be found amongst women than amongst men.

  Ellie’s shoulders slumped as she recalled the flutter of shame she had felt the first time she read that. She had been so excited to be married, to share the same bed each night with Brick, but the permission she’d felt to explore that part of their lives evaporated with Kenneth Walker’s withering judgment. Her swelling belly was not proof of their love, but evidence of her wantonness. She was a teenage girl so eager to touch, and be touched. For that, she was a freak.

  “Thanks for nothing, Ken.” She threw the book across the room and lay down on her back, clasping her hands across her stomach. Her daughter would mock Kenneth Walker and his disdain for women, of that she was sure.

  They’d had a fight yesterday, after Sam told her about Val Murphy.

  “You’re so judgmental,” Sam had yelled at her. “It’s the seventies, Mom. Girls have sex.”

  “What girls? Are you having sex?”

  Sam rolled her eyes. “That’s not what I’m saying, Mom. It’s just unfair for you to say Val’s ruined her life because she did. She’s pregnant, not dying.”

  “She was planning to go to college, Sam. Now she can’t.”

  “You didn’t go to college,” Sam said, narrowing her eyes. “Is your life ruined?”

  That’s when it hit her. Ellie had been Sam’s age when she became pregnant. When her dream of becoming a nurse evaporated. “I should have told you sooner,” Ellie said, fumbling with the buttons on her blouse. “I should have told the truth, that I had to get married.”

  Sam’s eyes grew with each revelation. “What do you mean you had to?” Sam said.

  “I was pregnant with you.”

  “So, you didn’t marry the year before I was born? How could you have lied to me like that? And all those lectures about how nice girls don’t have sex before marriage. God, Mom.”

  “I didn’t want you to make the same mistake.”

  “So, I’m a mistake?”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  Sam’s eyes welled up. “I’m sorry your life is so miserable because of me.”

  “Listen, you,” Ellie said, pointing at Sam. “I have loved being your mother.” Her voice started to quaver. “I have loved it even when you’ve hated being my daughter.”

  “Mom, I don’t—”

  “I just want you to have more choices than I did,” Ellie said. “I want you to become a mother when you want to. I don’t want you fooling around in a car.”

  Sam sniffed and smiled. “I was conceived in a car?”

  “Stop it, Sam.”

  “So, I’m just another tramp of hearts?”

  “What?”

  “A Springsteen joke. ‘Backstreets’?”

  Ellie tried not to smile. “It’s not a joke if you have to explain it.”

  “I’m not Val, Mom. I’m not even dating anyone, and if I did Lenny would talk him to death anyway. So you can stop worrying about me. Clearly, I’m headed for life as a spinster with a cat named Aretha. Bruce if it’s a boy.”

  Sam’s face brightened. “Hey. At least I’d finally have a pet. God, why is Dad like that?” She lowered her voice an octave to imita
te her father’s voice: “No other dog could ever be as good as my Patch.”

  “Be nice, Sam. You don’t know the whole story about Patch. It broke his heart when that dog died.”

  Sam put her hands on her hips again. “Mom. Is this about sex or dogs? Because I know what I’d rather talk about.”

  “Knock it off, Sam. I just want you to be careful.”

  Sam held up her hand and said, “I solemnly swear that my teen years have been, and will continue to be, far more boring than yours.”

  Ellie laughed. “You’re terrible.”

  Sam walked to the door and stopped in the doorway. “I have to go to work. And, Mom, remember this: In two weeks, I’m going to be the first person in our family to go to college. I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

  Sam’s vow was little comfort for Ellie. She grabbed the edge of the hope chest to pull herself to her feet, then walked across the room to pick up the book and toss it in the trash. “This ends with me,” she said out loud. She walked downstairs to the kitchen and dialed the wall phone. “Mardee? What are you doing on Saturday? You up for a drive?”

  * * *

  —

  Mardee held up the large paperback book and waved it toward Ellie. “My God, have you seen this thing? Look at this. Three pictures of a naked couple. Three different positions of sex, all about the clit-oh-ris.”

  Ellie glanced at the page. The car lurched, and they both shrieked. “I can’t look at those while I’m driving,” Ellie said. “They’re drawings, not pictures.”

  “Oh, okay. Did you notice where the drawing of his hand is?”

  Ellie raised her chin, her eyes on the road. “On her clit-o-ris, I imagine.” She glanced again at Mardee. “I’m a nurse’s aide. I know how to pronounce it.”

  They both started laughing. “Jesus Christ, El. I’ve never seen anything like this. Are you sure you want to give this to Sam?”

  Ellie flicked on her turn signal. “I could never have made this trip without you. Thanks, Mardee.”

  Mardee laughed again. “Why did we have to go all the way to Cleveland to buy this? I’m sure Maggie at Lakeside Books could have ordered it for you.”

  “And told everyone in town about it,” Ellie said. “You know how she is. Remember when Lois Ross talked about that True Confessions story about a woman being in love with a priest and everyone thought she was having an affair with that Father Mark? Maggie started that rumor.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Mardee said. “Lois almost became a Presbyterian just to stop the gossip.” She started thumbing through the book again. “Oh my God, listen to this: ‘Orgasm may start with a spastic muscle contraction of two to four seconds’ duration. Orgasm is three to fifteen rhythmic contractions of the muscles around the outer third of the vagina at point-eight-second intervals’—sweet Jesus, El. Who needs to know all this?”

  “Pretty much every man on planet Earth.”

  Mardee slammed the book shut and set it on her lap. “Where did you get the idea that this book”—she pointed at it—“this Our Bodies, Ourselves”—is the thing Sam should be reading?”

  “Phil Donahue.”

  “What?”

  “Phil Donahue talked about it on his show, on one of my days off. About how times have changed, and women should be able to get what they need, too, out of sex.”

  “I thought you wanted to make sure Sam didn’t get pregnant. What does orgasm have to do with that?”

  “Mardee, you’ve been my best friend for seventeen years. We tell each other everything.”

  Mardee nodded. “Everything.”

  “Except we’ve never talked about sex.”

  “Why on earth would we do that?”

  “Because. If we did, maybe we wouldn’t feel so lonely about it. About what’s happening. And what isn’t happening, for that matter.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  “I just mean that maybe that book is right. Maybe it helps if we can talk about it, at least with our friends.”

  Mardee picked up the book and started fanning the pages again. “Okay, fine. Let’s talk about hymens. Here’s a drawing of all the versions of hymens. I had no idea there were so many types.” She flipped a few pages. “Or, no,” she said, poking a picture with her finger. “Maybe we should start here. For our next canasta club, we can all bring our mirrors so that we can look at our vaginas.”

  “That’s going a bit far.” Ellie sighed. “Mardee, when we were Sam’s age, we wanted to have sex, remember?”

  “Barely.”

  “I still do.”

  “And Brick McGinty should drop to his knees every night and thank you and God for that miracle.”

  “That’s long ago, Mar. It’s behind us.”

  “I know, El. I’m sorry. And I’m glad you still like sex.”

  Ellie smiled at her. “Well, I do, and all of my life, I’ve felt that meant there was something wrong with me. I don’t want Sam to feel that way. I want her to know it’s normal, and I want her to protect herself, too.”

  “Well, look at you, Ms. Betty Friedan.”

  “I’m thinking more Gloria Steinem.”

  “Huh,” Mardee said, closing the book. “So far, she’s never married.”

  Ellie pulled the car onto the exit ramp. “Yeah, well. Some girls have all the luck.”

  * * *

  —

  Sam looked around the diner as she snatched the book and slipped it under the table and onto her lap. “Thank you, Mom.” Her face was crimson.

  Ellie reached under the table and tried to grab it. “I thought maybe we could talk about a couple of sections.”

  “No. Mom,” Sam said, pulling the book closer.

  Ellie tugged on it again. “Just. Give it.” She yanked harder. “To. Me.”

  “Fine,” Sam said, releasing both hands, which sent Ellie tipping the back of her chair into the elderly woman sitting at the table behind them. “Oh, my goodness,” Ellie said, clasping the book to her chest as she turned to face the woman. “I’m so sorry.”

  The woman and her equally old companion were staring at the book’s cover, speechless. Ellie looked down and flipped the book. She spun around, her eyes wide.

  Sam grinned. “Well, their lives will never be the same.”

  Ellie set the book facedown on the table. “All I’m trying to say is that whatever you’re feeling is normal. And I could help you understand a few things.”

  Sam waved her hands in front of her face. “Mom, if I were to make a list of what no teenage daughter wants to hear from her mother, ever, it would start and end with s-e-x.”

  Ellie flicked her napkin and spread it across her lap. “I’m a nurse’s aide. I’ve seen everything. And I care more about your safety than your embarrassment.” She picked up the menu and held it in front of her face. “I think we should go to Planned Parenthood.” Ellie lowered her menu. “You, I mean. I’ll sit in the car. I want you to get on the Pill.”

  Sam’s neck bloomed with blotches. “Mom, stop.”

  Ellie picked up the book and turned to one of the pages she had bookmarked. “Look, it’s right here, starting on page 186. It even has pictures of different types of birth control pills.”

  Sam glanced at the page. “If I tell you I’ll read this later, would you put the book away? It’s our last lunch at Brennan’s, Mom, before I leave for Kent State.”

  Ellie gently closed the book and slid it toward her daughter. “That’s all I’m asking. I want you to feel better about yourself than I did at your age. And I want you to be safe.”

  “Not pregnant, you mean,” Sam said. She returned the book to her lap and covered it with her napkin.

  “Yes,” Ellie said. “But it’s more than that.”

  “What else could there be?”

  “Well, there’s venereal disease.
He should always wear a condom.”

  “Ohhh-kay. Done.”

  Ellie raised her menu. “Let’s make that appointment.”

  Sam leaned across the table. “You’re not coming in with me.”

  “Got it.”

  “So bring a book.”

  Ellie smiled. “I have a book,” she said, pointing at Sam’s lap.

  Later that evening, Ellie stood on the footstool and wrote on that day’s square of the wall calendar: “Hi, Sam. On this day, Mom had the last word.”

  Sam squatted in front of her clothes closet and reached back for her record case holding all of her old forty-fives. She unlatched it and flicked through the alphabetized folders until she came to “P.” She pulled out a loosely wrapped wad of tissue paper and shook it open. The lighter fell into her lap. A silver Dunhill, engraved on one side.

  Sam ran her fingers across the inscription: LOVE, PINT.

  For six years, she had tried to figure out a way to return it to her father. The contents of that woman’s purse had spilled into the street on that awful day, and she was in such a rush to leave that she had missed this one thing. Sam had picked it up and recognized it as her father’s lighter, a gift from her mother before they married.

  For months, her father had been searching for it, repeatedly wondering aloud what had happened to it. Sam had found it all right, but she didn’t want to reveal how.

  She stood up and tucked the lighter into the front pocket of her jeans and walked over to her bed. Her mother’s train case was sitting open on the bedspread, packed almost to the brim. Sam sat down next to it and tipped it upside down. Two folded squares of paper dropped on top of the pile.

  She unfolded the yellowed newspaper clippings first. That woman, Rosemary, had showed up at their house the day before, and by the next morning Sam’s father had moved out and her mother looked like a zombie from Night of the Living Dead.

  The aftershock of the previous day’s earthquake landed with the thud of the afternoon paper at their front door.